SIGHTINGS the gidleys of sausalito In May, we had the pleasure of visiting with Mary Gidley, 82, and her son Memo, a professional race-car driver, on their Elliott 1050 Basic Instinct. At the berth in Sausalito, we listened to Mary's tales of life aboard and adventure from bygone times. Mary Gartland was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, the city of five lakes. "We lived next to a lake, so we spent summers in the water," said Mary. "My father was a fisherman. We had canoes and rowboats, but never sailboats. I went to the University of Wisconsin and graduated in journalism in 1959. I was looking for a daily newspaper close to San Francisco. I got a job offer from Eureka, and also from El Centro, so pretty much two different kinds of California." Mary ended up in Eureka, a reporter and women's page editor. "That's where I met Cass, in sort of a wild bar on 2nd Street. He was fishing crab. He also had a semi truck, and he was hauling crab down to the Bay Area and selling them in these little crab stands all over the county. He had 13 or something like that." "It was crazy hearing stories from Cass," said Memo. "Back then they would just park a fish truck on the side of the road." Cass converted roofing-tar trailers into crab boilers. "He'd cook the crabs right there in front of everybody, up and down Highway 101." "He had the idea he wanted to buy fish, even though he had been a fisherman for several years, because he thought the fishermen were getting cheated," explained Mary. "He leased the dock from Bob Rich. It was a whole different pier that's gone. You can still see the pilings if you go by Cass' Marina." Cass' Marina is a dock at the foot of Napa Street, just off Bridgeway, next to the Sausalito Cruising Club. "It went like a hundred yards out," said Memo. "They used to tie up a couple hundred fish boats. It was a big, big pier." Mary joined Cass in Marin County around 1961. "I quit my job and came down here," said Mary. "I thought adventure was down here. I was willing to go anywhere; I just did not want to have a normal life. We lived in a tent for a while in somebody's yard in Mill Valley, and started buying fish and shipping it to Meredith Fish Company in Sacramento. Then we had a fish plant where we processed salmon and sent them back east in barrels. We built the processing plant in one weekend. I don't remember ever getting a permit for anything. I was kind of the bookkeeper, the person who was trying to keep things straight and pay the bills. "We had a thriving fish-buying business. It developed into a fishand-chips restaurant and fish market. In the meantime, Sharon was born in 1962. She was named after the schooner Sharon. We lived on the dock most of the time. "In about 1962, Cass had the idea that people needed to get out on the water, and unless you belonged to a yacht club you weren't going to be able to. That was the idea behind Cass' Marina. We started with one boat, then it was exponential: two boats, four boats, eight boats, 16 boats. We ended up with about 20-some boats. We had a Bristol 27, a lot of O'Days, Mariners. They were open-cockpit fiberglass boats. We only had a couple big boats." Despite operating two businesses simultaneously, the Gidleys spent the off-season in 1963 sailing down the coast to Mexico on Tia Mia, a 28-ft Friendship sloop, when Sharon was not quite a year old. "We went down to San Quintin, but then we turned around because we had to come back for the salmon season, which started April 15. "Tia Mia still exists, believe it or not. It's up in San Rafael. The same person who bought it from us still owns it." Tia Mia is indeed berthed behind the Montecito Plaza on the San Rafael Canal. "The second year, we left the Tia Mia on a mooring by José Albaros' shipyard. He built a mooring for us, so we flew home. The next year we drove down to Mazatlan and took a ferry across and cruised up the gulf. My daughter Maria Guadalupe — Lupe — was born in La Paz, and she was back on a boat before she was 24 hours old. I mean continued on outside column of next sightings page Page 60 •
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• June, 2019
summer reading our favorite lines in recent years: "I may not be a great sailor," writes Emily, "but when it comes to my family, I know which way the wind is blowing." Arrow's Fall (Joel Scott, $18.95) — Hard-drinking adventurers Jared Kane and Daniel MacLean are back in this follow-up novel to Arrow's Flight. In that book, the two become friends in prison and later escape bad guys aboard Kane's 46-ft wooden sailboat Arrow. In Arrow's Fall, Kane, Danny and a host of oddball characters stumble on sunken treasure,